Digital video recorders (DVRs) have become very popular in recent years, increasingly replacing VCRs as the primary device for users to record all manner of television programs. In a DVR, programs are stored on a hard disk drive rather than on a VHS tape, which results in numerous benefits. Hard disk drives can typically store more programs than a VHS tape, can record one program while another previously recorded program is played back, can allow a user to begin watching a program that has already begun recording before the recording is completed, can oftentimes support better video and/or audio quality than a VHS tape, can allow indexing so that users can quickly see what programs are stored on the DVR and can quickly select programs for playback, can support random access to programs so that rewinding or fast forwarding to a particular portion of a tape is not required, and so on.
An additional advantage DVRs offer over VHS tape is the ability to replay a portion of a live program as it is being received. Some DVRs offer an “instant replay” feature that allows users to automatically replay a portion of the program that was just played. For example, a user watching a live football game that wants to watch a spectacular catch that was just made again can invoke the instant replay feature and have the previous ten seconds of the football game re-played, allowing him or her to re-watch that catch. After the ten-second replay has completed, the DVR returns to displaying the live program as it is received.
Although such replay functionality is very useful, it is not without its problems. One such problem is that, while the user is replaying a portion of the program, he or she is missing the other portions of the live program being received. For example, if the user invokes the instant replay feature and re-watches ten seconds of a football game, after replaying those ten seconds the DVR returns to displaying the live football game. Thus, the user has missed viewing the ten seconds of the football game that immediately succeeded the invoking of the instant replay feature.
One solution to this problem is for the DVR to simply continue playing the program but with a ten-second lag. In other words, after completing the ten-second replay, the DVR would not jump ahead to the current live position of the program, but instead would continue to display the program ten seconds behind the current live position of the program. Although this solution enables the user to avoid missing any of the program, it has its own problems because the user is no longer watching the program live. Every time the user invokes the instant replay option he or she gets another ten seconds behind the current live position of the program, which is an unacceptable situation for many users.
Thus, it would be beneficial to have an improved way of handling instant replay functionality.